OPERATION GLADIO

In August 1990, Giulio Andreotti, Italian Prime Minister, confirmed that during the Cold War period had existed in Italy and other Western countries, some of them attached to NATO, a clandestine army under the code name Gladio. His revelations led to a major political scandal, not only admit, but because he had denied in 1974, when he was defense minister.

The result of those investigations conducted in Italy between 1974 and 1990 came to light following information concerning the activities of the sinister Gladio, which sometimes appeared as a right-wing terrorist organization, and sometimes the extreme left, as appropriate their purposes. And what are these purposes? Destabilize certain European governments for the benefit of United States and increased their political influence in them. The Gladio network never acted in Britain.

Some terrorist actions carried out by Gladio:

1960 – Turkey: The military, backed by the CIA Gladio and still run by Allen Dulles, organized a coup and killed Prime Minister Adnan Menderes.

1964 – Italy: The Socialist ministers abandon their posts in the government after receiving death threats paths by the Gladio. Harassment maneuver known as Operation Solo.

1967 – Greece: Gladio organization in that country, acting under the banner of Hellenic Raid Force (Hellenic Raiding Force) stages a coup, established a military dictatorship.
1968 – Spain: ETA appears and commits his first murders. In 1970, the trial summary that has gone down in history as the process of Burgos. Facts of the case dated back to 1968. On 2 August of that year was assassinated police Apples Meliton, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of Social of San Sebastian police station and was the first victim of ETA.

On June 7, was killed José Pardines Azcay, Civil Guard officer during a traffic check. These were the first killings of the terrorist network and decided to try using a military tribunal to sixteen of its members.

1969 – Italy: a bomb explodes on a bench in Piazza Fontana in Milan, killing 16 people and wounding 80. In 1999 the former head of Italian intelligence service, General Maletti, said the attack was devised by the Gladio and alleged terrorists of the extreme right, supported by members of the Italian security forces that would have provided coverage.

1973 – Spain: The assassination of Admiral Carrero Blanco, head of Government and expected continuation of the scheme. The admiral, who had refused to provide logistical support to the Americans during the recent Arab-Israeli war, was killed one day after meeting in Madrid with the Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

1975 – Spain: A command of the extreme right, linked to the Italian Gladio network, attacked the office of a labor lawyer in Madrid linked with the Communist Party, which had not yet been legalized.

1976 – Spain: Mercenaries from the Gladio provoke a confrontation between different groups Carlist Montejurra during a demonstration in which several were killed.

1977 – Spain: January 24 Gladio perpetrated the massacre at number 55 Calle de Atocha (Madrid). Labor lawyers were killed Valdevira Enrique Ibanez, Luis Javier Benavides Orgaz and Sauquillo Francisco Javier Pérez del Arco, Serafin law student Holgado and administrative Antonio Ángel Rodríguez Leal, and seriously injured Gil Miguel Sarabia, Alejandro Ruiz-Huerta Carbonell, Luis Ramos Pardo and Dolores González Ruiz, married to Sauquillo. She was pregnant and lost the child also expected. The authorship of Gladio was confirmed by a confidential report of the Executive Committee for Intelligence and Security Services (CESIS), an agency under the Presidency of the Council of Ministers of Italy.

1977 – Germany:{##34##} The Red Army Faction (German Rote Armee Fraktion, or RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof (by the name of their two most prominent), caused a great stir in Germany (especially in the fall of that year), which led to an unprecedented national crisis since the Second World War and which resulted in the deaths of 34 people and 20 members of the terrorist group due to various attacks and clashes with security forces German.

1978 – Italy: Assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro kidnapped by the Red Brigades, a terrorist organization founded in 1969 which declared Marxist-Leninist. Moro was kidnapped on her way to a session of Congress that was going to vote a motion of confidence in the new government led by Giulio Andreotti, the Italian Communist Party support. It was the first time you put into practice the so-called compromesso Storico by which the Italian Communists came to form the government of concentration to overcome the severe crisis suffered then Italy. Moro had always advocated the understanding between Communists and Christian Democrats.
1980 – Italy and Germany bombed the Bologna train station and during the celebration of the Oktoberfest in Munich, killing a total of 98 people and wounding over 400. In both cases there was evidence of the involvement of the Gladio and U.S. secret services.

1981 – Spain: mass poisoning by consumption of denatured rapeseed oil (Rapeseed Oil Syndrome) and alleged coup attempt of February 23. Several activities planned and executed by the CIA, and related to the entry of Spain into NATO, forced the resignation of then Prime Minister, Adolfo Suárez, and paved the way for the victory of the PSOE in the general election of 1982.

1983-1985 – Belgium: There is a series of actions as violent as absurd. Groups of armed men fired indiscriminately killing civilians in several restaurants and supermarkets in the district of Brabant. Up to 28 people were killed and thousands were seriously injured. The unfinished investigations suggested the involvement in the bombings of members of the Belgian Armed Forces and suspected right-wing groups associated with the American and British secret services.

1990 – Switzerland: found dead the former head of the Swiss secret army P26, Colonel Alboth, stabbed with his own bayonet, after having made sure that he was willing to disclose the “whole truth” about the clandestine activities of Gladio terrorist network in Switzerland .

As information on the organization Gladio were subsequently published, the story was becoming more ominous. Since the beginning of the Cold War, independent agencies franchised by the secret services of Britain and the United States established a vast network of hired murderers, paramilitary groups, terrorist organizations and weapons caches throughout Western Europe.

Gladio remained very active until the scandal broke Andreotti in Italy in 1990. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union the following year there were dramatic changes worldwide, and Gladio activity decreased until it disappeared, apparently.

May ’68 in France, a major action taken by the CIA in Europe, was to cause the downfall of President Charles De Gaulle for having gone ahead with its nuclear program and refusing to allow NATO to maintain its military bases in France . The French Communist Party, and all formations left of that country, claiming that forty years have had nothing to do with the organization of the pantomime of the French May.

Seeded American secret services of bloody attacks Europe for two decades with the primary purpose of destabilizing several democratically elected governments and get rid of politicians uncomfortable and unwilling to bow to U.S. interests.

Andreotti After the scandal spread throughout Europe with a strong indignation over the illegal activities of Gladio and the matter was investigated in several countries besides Italy. However, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the scandal over the illegal activities of Gladio was moved from the front pages of newspapers and suitably muted.

Twenty years after confirmation of their existence by Giulio Andreotti, the network Gladio and NATO’s Secret Armies, are generating a lot of questions left unanswered, but the existence of Gladio has been confirmed by several heads of State, by three parliamentary inquiries (in Italy, Belgium and Switzerland), and in particular a strange denial and subsequent confirmation of its existence, NATO itself in 1990. Still, apart from those involved in the network, very few people know for sure how it worked, or how they defined their objectives.

There is sufficient evidence and personal testimonies that suggest links with terrorist groups of the extreme right and extreme left active in the decades of the seventies and eighties, and that the Gladio itself was responsible for the implementation of the “strategy of tension” by deliberate use of terrorism to create panic and influence election results in different countries. As happened in Spain in October 1982, when people went to vote in the syndrome of “strengthening democracy had to be” threatened by the reactionary and the Army, following the alleged attempted coup of February 23, 1981. A Paripe with every appearance of having been concocted by the CIA to uphold the King Juan Carlos I as head of the Spanish state and get rid of all the “uncomfortable” that remained within the armed forces, unwilling to income Spain in NATO. De facto, a surrender that allowed the presence of foreign occupying forces on Spanish soil disguised as “allies.”

If Gladio has disappeared forever, or has simply evolved into another type of criminal organization is something we do not know for sure. But several indicators suggest that the paramilitary terrorist network has been dismantled. Moreover, the attacks of March 11, 2004 in Madrid clearly indicate that the terrorist network is operational and serving intermittently.

In May 2002, during the general election campaign in Holland, was killed the charismatic and, according to all polls, a great favorite for overall victory, the candidate of the nationalist right, Pym Fortuyn. Among other things, Fortuyn advocated the immediate withdrawal of the Netherlands of the European Union, as well as closing borders to illegal immigration outside the community. A “green compulsive personality” named Volkert van der Graaf killed him days before the election and was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment.

Also, Polish President Lech Kaczynski died in a plane crash in early April 2010 when his plane crashed near the airport of Smolensk in Russia. On board were 87 people and there were no survivors. Lech Kaczynski had distinguished himself as one of the top political leaders reluctant to make further transfers of national sovereignty to the European Union. Kaczynski and was, to put it mildly, a character “uncomfortable” within the EU.

Jörg Haider, governor of the Federal State of Carinthia (governed by Haider continuously since 1999) and leader of the Alliance for Austria’s Future, advocated a political agenda very similar to the Dutch Pym Fortuyn.

Haider died in October 2008 in a serious car accident south of the city of Klagenfurt. He was alone at the wheel of his vehicle when it left the road, overtaking, and crashed into a concrete pillar. Haider was a key figure in the Austrian political landscape of the past 20 years. His sudden death shocked Austria in a moment of uncertainty, two weeks after parliamentary elections that resulted in another victory for the nationalists.

Since within the EU is not pleased that the Austrian electorate had decided freely in the polls, Austria Brussels imposed diplomatic sanctions battery and Israel withdrew its ambassador. Bowing to international pressure, Haider left his colleagues in charge of the government and retreated to Carinthia region of the country to avoid greater evils. The notice was too loud and clear to ignore.

For many researchers, journalists and writers, these recent deaths are unlikely to be political sovereignty project of the European Union show that a terrorist network continues to act forcefully to influence the domestic politics of member countries of the Union, and all due a well laid plan: to launch a “second strategy of tension” to accelerate the consolidation process of the European Union as a supranational political reality. Hence, few question the desirability of the project immediately disappear from the public, or be executed without hesitation.

Gladio terrorist organization on many questions have remained unanswered because, even in the case of parliamentary inquiries, sooner or later see the insurmountable obstacle of a state secret. A NATO representative said the following to a reporter from Reuters news agency on 15 November 1990, shortly after the scandal uncovered by Andreotti: “I do not expect you to answer many questions, though the Cold War has ended. Assuming that links have been [of NATO] to terrorist organizations, will have such information buried deep inside. ”
Research conducted in Belgium during the nineties found valuable details about the structure of the Gladio network.

In this country, like others who were part of NATO, the first step was taken with the establishment of a tripartite committee between the host country, the UK and U.S.. Later in 1948, established a general agency to coordinate several Western European countries, known as the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union [Western Union Clandestine Committee]. The WUCC was in 1951, subordinated to NATO, and renamed the Clandestine Planning Committee [Clandestine Planning Committee]. It also founded a second body: the Allied Clandestine Committee [Allied Clandestine Committee]. After France left the NATO headquarters of these committees were transferred to Brussels. In all cases these networks were organized in secret.

The secret armies functioned as part of the Western collegiate defense against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But the gradual acquisition by the Gladio elements of the far left made some wonder if the true function of the organization was to organize resistance to Western defense in case of Soviet invasion or, conversely, create chaos in allied countries.

Gladio was a network of international terrorism organized by the secret services of Britain and the United States under the NATO umbrella. Charles De Gaulle understood it immediately and took France out of this mess, but it cost him his own and was about to be killed repeatedly by the OAS, another branch of Gladio.

To destabilize the Government of Spain, the Gladio launched far-left terrorism more brutal and bloody: ETA, GRAPO, FRAP … all these terrorist organizations began to work at that time, around 1968, coinciding with the French May, which was the maneuver employed by the CIA in France to end Charles De Gaulle.

The alleged risk (very remote) of a Soviet invasion was the excuse for Americans and British occupied much of Western Europe. One of the designers of the Gladio was Richard Helms, CIA Director from 1966-1973 and a close associate of President Richard Nixon. The tactics of terrorism used by the CIA have not changed much since then and the train is still one of their favorite scenes, but now the attacks attributed to Islamic terrorism rather than the extreme left.

In Italy, for example, the terrible bombing of Bologna station in 1980, much like those in Madrid on March 11, 2004, is still a vivid memory of the Italians. That vicious terrorist attack claimed 85 victims. Research conducted to clarify responsibility for the attack was constantly hampered by the secret service and police sector and the Italian judiciary.

That same year, 1980, a bomb exploded at the Oktoberfest in Munich, killing 13 people. At first police investigation blamed an alleged activist of the extreme right of 21-year-old Gundholf Köhler, who promptly died in the attack. German police said belonged to the group Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann. The police’s own experts recognized shortly after the bomb was too complex to have been manufactured by a person of 21 years, no previous experience in the manufacture of explosive devices. In 1981, a year later, police discovered a large weapons cache near the town of Uelzen. The official explanation was that the terrorists had hidden weapons, which were controlled by one Heinz Lembke, but the amount and type of weapons to be found made many question marks over this timely explanation. Automatic weapons, chemical warfare equipment and bacterial, 50 anti-tank guns, 156 kg of explosives, 230 explosive devices and 258 hand grenades. Too sophisticated!

Several investigative journalists Heinz Lembke related to the BND German underground army. Later, official investigations denied any link between Lembke and the slaughter of Munich. A Heinz Lembke was found hanged with a rope that was never explained where it came from and how it came to him while in police custody in 1981.

In the case of the slaughter of the Bologna station is established that members of the Italian secret services provided false information and placed a bag containing fake explosives on a train, which leads us to conclude that had to be a relationship between those who planted pumps and concealed them. The similarities between the slaughter of Bologna in 1980 and Madrid in 2004 is undeniable.

This terrorism remote control that was developed with particular intensity in the decade 1975-1985, did not affect only Italy and Germany. In Belgium, a rare operation was carried out in 1984 near Vielsalm, city of Wallonia. A platoon of U.S. marines parachuted into Belgium jumped and left meet a service member of the Belgian military intelligence. They hid for two weeks before attacking the Vielsalm station as part of an exercise called Operation Oesling during which they killed a policeman in Belgium. A U.S. military wounded during the operation, losing an eye. It was initially believed the attack was an act of terrorism but later proved to have been a secret military operation joint US-Belgian, as was confirmed by the investigations of the Belgian Senate in 1991. Other attacks came to it in which, as in the case of Vielsalm, weapons and ammunition were confiscated. Weapons that subsequently came into the hands of extremist groups. A fundamental question in the investigation by the Belgian Senate on the network of secret armies was whether he had anything to do with the famous massacre of Brabant in the eighties. These were a series of attacks that were carried out in municipalities in the outskirts of Brussels for about two years. Jewellery, restaurants, banks and even supermarkets, were attacked by paramilitary groups composed of ruthless men, armed to the teeth. In all the attacks made at that time in Belgium, the criminals were taking small sums of money, although acting as professionals employed a coordinated and unprecedented brutality. A phenomenon that is taking place in Spain for several years, attributed these alleged thefts paramilitary gangs from Eastern Europe made up of former members of the armed forces of those countries.

On November 9, 1985, gunmen entered a grocery store and opened fire indiscriminately. It was Saturday afternoon and the mall was crowded. Eight people were killed, some while trying to escape. The money that the robbers took was around 2000 pounds sterling, a paltry loot was found in a canal put in a plastic bag unopened. Research commissioned by the Belgian Senate and the judicial authorities determined beyond any doubt that the motive for that attack was not the money supermarket. However, due to a kind of bureaucratic resistance by the secret services and the Belgian military intelligence, the investigation failed to establish any link between the murders and the Gladio terrorist organization.

Lyndon LaRouche is a recognized American philanthropist led several political organizations in the United States and other countries. He is the founder and editor of Executive Intelligence Review (Executive Intelligence Report), an independent agency of news and analysis of global information backbone of the movement that led LaRouche. The day of the bombings in Madrid on March 11, 2004, Lyndon LaRouche issued a statement dismissing the idea that terrorist attacks had been carried out by the Basque terrorist group ETA or Islamic terrorists, and said the atrocity in Madrid will recalled the attack in 1980 at the Bologna train station and, in general, the “strategy of tension” over terrorism carried out by the Gladio in Italy in the early eighties.

In the following days, several experts interviewed by EIR, as well as independent newspapers commentators pointed in the same direction: the bombings of trains in Madrid, were planned by Western intelligence services, on necessary collusion with members of the police and security forces State.

Between 1969 and 1974, Italy was rocked by a series of terrorist attacks using bombs. The beginning of this period, which was later called the strategy of tension, is officially marked by the pump of December 12, 1969 that exploded in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana in Milan, known as the slaughter Piazza Fontana, in which 16 people were killed and 58 wounded. The end of the strategy of tension, strictly considered, is marked by the bomb on the train Italicus, August 4, 1974 in San Benedetto Val di Sambro, which killed 12 people and wounded 105. During this period there were at least four known attempts coup in Italy.

But the biggest terrorist slaughter until then, took place six years later, on August 2, 1980 in Bologna, where a suitcase containing about 20 kg of explosives detonated in the train station, killing 85 people and wounding more than 200 . Was officially claimed responsibility for a right-wing terrorist group called Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR). But here is a severe mismatch, since the term “revolution” or “revolutionary” are not part or the language or the ideology of the extreme right or Italy or any other Western country. It is so shocking as a left wing organization proclaimed “traditionalist” or “nationalist.”

The bombing of Bologna, by the time it took place, does not belong strictly to the so-called strategy of tension was not related to any plan to carry out a coup or sudden change in the Italian Government at the time. However, the terrorist organizations involved were self-command of the period of the strategy of tension that had been reorganized. As in the Piazza Fontana bombing and other cases, there was a systematic cover-up of the perpetrators of the massacres by certain sectors within the Armed Forces, police and the Italian secret services.

Several judicial and parliamentary investigations have established that a relationship exists between the massacre of Piazza Fontana, Italicus train bombs and the slaughter of 1980 in Bologna railway station. Highlights include the official investigation by the attacks of Bologna, and the latest by the Piazza Fontana initiated by the prosecutor Guido Salvini in 1992 in Milan, and the results of the Parliamentary Committee for Identifying the Authors of Terrorist Massacres who worked on investigations between 1994 and 2001.

The trial for the bombing of Bologna station in 1980 ended with the conviction of Valerio Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro as perpetrators of the massacres, and Licio Gelli disturbing, belonging to the P2 Masonic lodge, also involved in the assassination of Pope John Paul I in 1978 and several deaths that followed the scandal of Banco Ambrosiano in 1982 and left a bloody trail of corpses.

Piazza Fontana: Italian 11-M

The technique adopted in the atrocity in Madrid, the simultaneous bombings on trains, is not new. The slaughter of 1969 in Piazza Fontana was preceded by a series of demonstrative actions that began on the night of 8 to 9 August, with ten bombs on ten different trains. Eight of them, low power, exploded. Those bombs were planted by neo-fascist organization Ordine Nuovo called, but investigators were led to the belief that they were left wing activists [anarchists] who did. There were further demonstration actions in the months following the attack, until December 12 of that year, there was what might be called a qualitative leap in the implementation of those terrorist acts. A series of powerful bombs went off in the Piazza Fontana in Milan, but also in Rome, where three devices wounded 13 people. Luckily, another bomb was placed in the center of Milan, in Piazza Scala, did not explode.

Here we Find yourselves with two elements clearly reminiscent of the Madrid bombings, bombs and trains. It’s about as brutal terrorist action and kill indiscriminately. Instead of the current Islamic fundamentalists, the alleged terrorists were active then the extreme right or extreme left. Thus, the real perpetrators of the slaughter of Milan and their accomplices led to the police and prosecutors to search for the murderers in the extreme left, finally choosing the anarchists as perpetrators of the attack in Piazza Fontana in August 1969.

Two well-known anarchist, Giuseppe Pinelli and Pietro Valpreda, were immediately arrested. Pinelli died that same evening by jumping from a window in the police station where he was being interrogated. The official investigation concluded that his death was a suicide. Valpreda spent several years in prison until they were dropped all charges and was released. However, several eyewitnesses, including a taxi driver, who claimed to have seen some suspects shortly before the explosion and had stated that they could recognize them, died under mysterious circumstances never clarified.

As in other recent cases and close, covering up the real perpetrators of the murders and acts of terrorism was orchestrated from the Ministry of Interior, which depended on the police and an office called Ufficio Affari Riservati (UAR), a kind of agency Internal Intelligence, whose chief was Federico Umberto d’Amato Italian former double agent who had begun his career during the Second World War under the command of James Angleton, the then head of operations of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Italy . At that time the OSS (the future CIA) was overseen by U.S. Military Intelligence and the British MI6. After the war, and thanks to the decisive support of James Angleton, D’Amato was appointed executive director of the Special Secretariat of NATO, acting as liaison between it and the secret services of the United States.

Guido Salvini, Milan prosecutor, Delfo Zorzi had established that the terrorist initially convicted and then acquitted, for having planted the bomb in Piazza Fontana had been recruited by D’Amato in 1968. But the prosecutor discovered Salvini more. A witness, Carlo Diglio, decided in 1992 to assist in investigations and revealed that he had worked as an infiltrator in the group of Zorzi for U.S. military intelligence framed within the command of NATO in Verona.

DISCLAIMER

DISCLAIMER
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The myriad of facts, conjecture, perspectives, viewpoints, opinions, analyses, and information in the articles, stories and commentaries posted on this site range from cutting edge hard news and comment to extreme and unusual perspectives. We choose not to sweep uncomfortable material under the rug - where it can grow and fester. We choose not to censor skewed logic and uncomfortable rhetoric. These things reflect the world as it now is - for better and worse. We present multiple facts, perspectives, viewpoints, opinions, analyses, and information. As with all controversies, we stand ready to post any and all rebuttals and responses from people mentioned in the material we post.
FOR MORE INFORMATION REVIEW DISCLAIMER UNDER THE CONTACT SECTION, OR, SELECT THE LINK BELOWFull Disclaimer